


My sadness feels so clean

by islasands



Series: Lambski [45]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: Dark Light, M/M, Paris - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 03:57:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam is meeting Sauli in Paris. He wonders what he is letting himself in for...</p><p>The beautiful song, Ma Mémoire Sale, is about wanting and needing to have memories washed clean, memories that have been muddied, sullied, by sorrow.</p><p>You may like to listen to it as you read. And then watch the video, from the movie,"Les Chansons D'Amour", which is also beautiful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My sadness feels so clean

Ma Mémoire Sale

  
Louis Garrel  


  
  


  


What am I doing here? Why, oh why did I set this up?

It was one thing for us to collide in the no man’s land of a bar in Helsinki, one thing to take his face in my hands, one thing to kiss him under the cover of anonymity in a foreign city, as full of vodka as I am of shit…But his face. His eyes.

Full of shit? The lies I keep and don’t tell. Such as the lie that it doesn’t matter to me that my interior matches so perfectly the exterior of this city – Paris, the city of love no less, so beautiful in its disguise of snow. See how a fall of snow can soften harsh realities! The people, the streets, the stacks of concrete and glass, they all look so novelesque beneath the confetti of snow. The cares of the day, the past and future that shaped them, all forgotten in flurries of postcard snow.

Which is exactly how transforming the stage is for me. Hah! From frog to prince, analyst to crazy fuck, fatalist to base jumper. 

And yes. I think too damn much.

 _But that is_ so _not what happened with him. Not with that face. That smile. My hands making a frame for it. Etching it in my memory._

_It was all so damn liminal. Like being on the threshold of something. A door to our own nowhere. Small wonder that when we went looking for a café at four in the morning all we really wanted was a succession of doorways where we could kiss. And between the kisses, the laughter. Cracking the shit up at nothing, at everything, so that in the end it was laughter that brought us to our knees, as though all along that had been its aim, and we slumped down beside the window of a shop and began to kiss seriously, with only our lips touching, suddenly facing the idea of each other, … wondering what was inside our clothing, and what it would mean to strip everything off, and lie on a bed, skin touching skin, taking turns at feeling each other’s weight of existence, the gravity of it, the sheer relief of surrendering upwards into one another’s flesh and will and appetite._

_How do I know he was thinking these things too? Of course I knew. We didn’t once close our eyes as we kissed._

_And it was not at all romantic, or fuck searching. There was no starry night above us, just a faulty neon sign whirring and juddering, changing colours like the colours in a kaleidescope, red, green, blue, white. And that’s when I asked him to come to Paris. He pulled away from me, read my face, liked what he saw and leaned forward so he could say yes against my lips, and I remember thinking, - hazily I admit, because, well fuck it, have you seen him! Have you really_ _seen him? Up close the way I have? -  I remember it crossing my mind that he liked what he saw too much. And that was not what I was looking for._

_I mean to say, after so many months on the road I had a glacier creaking and shrieking on one side of my brain and a tropical lagoon on the other… and I was not looking for love any more than snow is searching for the ground. That was my story and I was sticking to it. And underneath it all, like the sludge that remains when snow has melted, I was walking a muddy track of sadness that didn’t even save my footprints._

But here we are in an elevator, and he is leaning on one wall, and I am leaning on another, and I am scared shitless. Something about him is so scarily free of subtext. He is exactly what he says. What he does. So elemental in his lack of self-consciousness. Like the proverbial breath of fresh air, or the clean sweet smell of the hay you should make when the sun shines…

He is standing there looking at me, unperturbed by the silence that we are bridging with the longest stare of my entire life, whereas I am afraid he can hear my heart beating. I am afraid that this man doesn’t care what I think, and might care what I am feeling.

It is not a confidence I can relate to easily, not when I am fighting the urge to step forward, press a button and bring this elevator to a halt, and put my finger on his lips to prevent him saying anything, and then undo his jacket, his shirt, and place the back of my hand against his sternum, and run my knuckles slowly up to his throat, not once looking at his face. Just concentrating on feeling his skin, and the tensile gap between our bodies, the ache we are sharing, of delaying, avoiding, refusing to meet each other’s eyes.

And finally, still keeping my eyes averted, taking his jaw in my hand, finding his mouth, those lips so dry and tender, like the flesh of a fruit sunning itself on a tree, and making them mine, discovering the liquid within, while my other hand clutches his belt and pulls him into me. Without once looking into his eyes.

Why?

I don’t want him to see me. Because I don’t think I could bear it if he didn’t.

So what am I doing here? Flicking on a lamp. Pouring drinks. My head clinking as though it too is full of ice. And fuck, he has taken my drink, and is pushing me back against the refrigerator, both hands inside my coat, thumbs pressing on my nipples, his lips brushing across mine, brushing to and fro, caressing me with his breath. And it occurs to me that I would like that breath to run across his vocal chords and bring a message to me. Saying what? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can’t go there. And I won’t...

And then, in a blur of some kind of emotional and physical incandescence, we are naked. I am lying on top of him, and he smiles, and I ask what he is thinking. 

"I am thinking it would be easy to love you."

"That's not a good idea," I say. "Not a good idea at all."

But I feel so clean. My sadness feels so clean.


End file.
